The process of how ideas become working features on the web is a mystery to most people and I suspect that most developers have the sense that they can actually influence that process. Over the past couple weeks a number of articles have appeared discussing the way forward in the open web. They share a core underlying ideal: web developers need the ability to extend the web with new features or in other words:

In order for the open web to compete with its walled competitors, there must be a clear path for good ideas by web developers to become part of the infrastructure of the web.— The Extensible Web Manifesto

In The Extensible Web Manifesto, a number of important figures in the JavaScript community have committed to changing “how web standards committees create and prioritize new features”.

Yehuda Katz fleshes out the ideas of the manifesto in his post Extend the web forward and invites implementers and practitioners to help make it happen. This is a critical piece of the puzzle: to move forward we need not only a clear path for good ideas, we need developers to travel down that path.

Alex Russell is one such developer and he provides a great view into that journey in his post s/Future/Promise/g that describes some of the history and hard work behind the recent developments of the WHATWG DOM spec as it relates to promises which has culminated in not only Mozilla and Google beginning to implement Promises in their engines, but also the W3C TAG recommendation to spec authors “that they adopt Promises for asynchronous, single-valued operations.”

The big reason to spend months of my life on this problem, and to harass other very busy people to do the same, is to me the core value of web standards: when they’re working well, they create a uniform surface area that describes a coherent platform. — Alex Russell

Moving the web forward is hard work but we owe it to each other to participate in the process. Thank you to everyone who tirelessly works towards the future. These are exciting times to be a web developer.